Semantic Business Concepts Model from DATA FOOD CONSORTIUM

Food system actors are constantly confronted with the need for multiple data inputs, inventory management problems and many manual operations (from production monitoring to land- and products catalog management, online sales via e-commerce tools, invoicing, accounting, etc.) to compensate for the lack of cross-platform communication in the food chain.

DATA FOOD CONSORTIUM aims to build an open and transparent food system that promotes interoperability among actors and processes in the food chain.

"We don’t want to work alone on our side, we want the work we are doing to converge with more generic business ontologies, and we hope we can contribute in evolving those ontologies with the specific reflexion we had on local / direct / short supply chains business concepts".

The ultimate goal is to build the data infrastructure to enable a more decentralized and "plural" food system to emerge.

The first stage of the DATA FOOD CONSORTIUM project in this direction will be to prototype of how a producer catalog can be shared and propagated to other platforms, to make the life easier for (small) producers who sell directly through multiple channels.

To that end, the project team has worked on the semantic concepts and relations, and it is now entering the "hard core" stage of looking at attributes/properties in order to enforce a technical solution to interoperate platforms involved.

You might be interested to read a recent blog post describing the business concepts and ontologies (developed for the DATA FOOD CONSORTIUM project) focused on:

What ? The products that producers grow/transform and that distributors sell, stock, catalogs, baskets, parcels…

"Lots of actors have built products ontologies. Some are pretty retail oriented, like the GS1 France products classification, for instance. Some are really agronomically oriented, like AGROVOC. But few really mix both.

We only found UNSPSCwhich is built and maintained by GS1 US. That could be a start, but we wanted to have a deep reflexion about “how do we make sure, when two machines exchange information about a product, that they talk about the same product?